The High Rollers scooter rally claims to have the largest scooter ride in the nation: a ride to the Hoover Dam that supposedly involves close to a thousand scooters. I have no idea if that was the case. That ride was all about going as fast as one possibly could on desert roads that stretched well over 100 miles without stop signs or stoplights. Considering that scooters have top speeds ranging between 45 mph and 90 mph, it should be no surprise that the ride quickly deteriorated into dozens of individual clumps of scooters with similar top speeds, rather than a coherent group of hundreds of scooters. Which is what it should have been, at least in my humble opinion.
Actually, all of the rides were like this. Disorganized, long and at top speed. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy zipping along in the desert at speeds varying between 60 and 70 mph. It’s just that the pictures I had imagined taking–of a tight pack of a hundred scooters or more weaving around an S-shaped pair of hairpin turns running down the slope of a hill with the rocky crags of desert mountains in the background–just weren’t there. Yeah, I could get a shot of three scooters coming around those hairpin turns. But the group broke up so quickly, there just weren’t any options.
So instead of trying to capture the feeling of being in a pack of scooters, I spent most of my photographic efforts zooming in close to parked scooters. The details were wonderful: see for yourself. And it didn’t hurt that High Rollers seemed to have a high proportion of blinged-out scooters.
Like every scooter rally I’ve ever been to, of course, I felt completely out of place. There’s this hipster/mod-ster/rocker style that just doesn’t match with my crunchy-yuppie hybrid thing. Of course, I barely even tried to fit in this time. Instead of trying to find interest in what ever it is some individual has done to their scooter recently, I just spent the entire trip with my camera. I was completely and utterly exhausted, but the nine rolls I took turned out relatively nicely. I even got some decent pictures of the Strip and of Red Rock Canyon.